Rick,

The point I am making (which is what I think you are saying) is not that there are no optimizations or the Visual C# team is not putting effort into optimizations but that they are limited in scope. They believe the real rewards are in smart JIT'ers.

To quote Mike Montwill from the Visual C# team:-

"The list of optimizations performed by the C# compiler itself is really short. We currently depend on the JIT compiler or NGEN to perform the classical optimizations such as common subexpression elimination or method inlining. The set of our optimizations consists of only those that could be performed with a minimum of effort and those that would be expected to cause no large performance impact. After all, it makes a lot more sense to invest in a really smart JIT compiler that can be applied to intermediate language generated by all the various language compilers."

Regards
Neil